Like this:

I’ve recently had some problems with an OCS 2007 R2 installation where the users were complaining that they couldn’t add external phone numbers to a conference call. Internal numbers and SIP contacts were working fine.

I did some tracing, and noticed that the service provider gateway returned a 404 Not found when answering to the SIP Invite of the phone number. I checked the number, and it seemed correct.

But the FROM: field of the INVITE was populated with the users SIP URI not the users TEL URI, which the service provider didn’t handle. Normally a call through the mediation server will use the TEL URI, but turns out that it doesn’t in this case. There is AFAIK no way to handle this in OCS 2007 R2. (There might be in Lync, but I’ll need to lab that. The conference call behaves the same way in Lync, but you have the option to substitute the dialed from number on the route.)

This means that the service provider needs to handle this and substitute all unknown URI’s in the FROM: field with some known number, ex. the Dial In conference number or the main number of the organization, unless the service provider wants to maintain a database of the users and their corresponding TEL URI.

It might also be a solution to put some kind of gateway between the PSTN and OCS that does the conversion.

Like this:

So I’ve been fiddling a bit with photos in Lync today. Seems easy enough when you have Exchange 2o10 and can use powershell, see this post, but can be more tricky if you haven’t. Lync 2010 does not supply a method of uploading the pictures to AD, it just uses the photo found in the user attribute thumbnailPhoto. You’ll have to upload the pictures another way.

After a bit of searching on the net, I found this post that had a link to a small .dll, written by a guy named OliD, that extends the ADUC (Active Directory Users and Computers) MMC with two tabs to the user properties page. The first tab we don’t really need, but it will enable you to add employee ID/number. The other will upload and resize the selected image to 96×96 px. It can be downloaded from:

If you have a multidomain forest you will also need to enable global replication of the attribute. This procedure is described in the Exchangeteam blogpost linked in the beginning of this post.

The photo won’t display in the Lync client right away though. As per this the ABServer in Lync 2010 has an update pass every night at 01:30AM Server time, just as in OCS2007R2. To speed this up you can run the cmdlet

Update-CsAddressBook

in the Lync management shell. Note that by default it will still take up to 5 minutes before the actual update pass is run. Look for event 21056 in the event log.

If the user has not had any photos before, just log the user in and out of Lync, and it should be updated. If this is an updated photo, you will have to log out and exit the client and then delete the file